how to be a frugal gardener

Ever tried to grow your own food, only to end up with a measly few utterly tasteless cucumbers that cost approximately $46 each to produce? Not ideal. But worry not, aspiring green thumb. Follow these tips for tightwad gardeners and you’ll soon be eating regularly from your veggie patch – and saving moolah too.

PUT WEEDS TO WORK If you want to grow great veggies for next to nix, you first need to master growing great soil. Healthy living soil is the secret sauce for plants. Beneficial microbes underground help roots soak up nutrients, giving plants Hulk-level strength to ward off pests and diseases while pumping out bigger, tastier harvests for you. Wins all round.

Happily, you can feed your soil for free. Forget paying for mulch – instead, ‘chop and drop’ weeds (before they go to seed) by cutting at the stem’s base and leaving all that nutrient-rich green goodness lying across the ground, slowly enriching your soil as it breaks down. Or shell out five bucks on a packet of ‘green manure’ seeds and grow a specific combo of leafy green plants to later hack down and allow to rot – an excellent way to build healthy soil before starting a new veggie patch.

GROW FREE PLANTS FROM CUTTINGS Once your soil is cranking, you’re ready to start planting. Stroll your local streets and you’ll find a bounty of edibles that grow quickly from free cuttings – no one will notice a couple of 15cm lengths snipped unobtrusively from an overhanging branch. Rosemary, mint and sage are usually the easiest to find and grow.

Back home, pull off the leaves on the bottom third of the stem (the bit that will go underground). Dunk this section in honey if you have some handy; it’s a natural way to kickstart strong root growth. Plant into a pot filled with well-draining potting mix and wait about a month until you see new leaves starting to form. Huzzah! You’ve officially cloned your neighbour’s rosemary and now have a free plant of your own.

REGROW SUPERMARKET VEGGIES Those food scraps you’ve been ditching might just be a cheapskate source of more edible plants. When it comes to veggies that can be regrown from scraps, spring onions are the absolute heroes. Buy a bunch and cut about two centimetres above the root, using the green tops in your cooking. Poke the leftover root into some soil and it’ll quickly regrow – multiple times over, delivering you about four harvests of spring onions from one plant. See? Total hero.

Celery and some lettuces can also be snipped at the base and their leaves regrown in a bowl of water. Or look for supermarket herbs and leafy greens with roots still intact, so you can replant once you’re done eating. And those ageing potatoes with mutant-like spiky bumps all over them? These bumps are known as ‘eyes’, the sprouts from which new potatoes grow. Cut them off and plant in soil to grow yet more taters. But a word of caution – supermarket spuds are often sprayed with growth-inhibiting chemicals, so organic potatoes are best.

CHOOSE PLANTS THAT LIVE LONGER Do future you a solid by prioritising perennials: plants that live for more than two years. This is a permaculture style of gardening, which gradually creates less work and expense over time as you reduce the need to replant annuals each year. Lazy, spendthrift gardening for the win.

Asparagus and strawberries are about the tastiest perennials you can grow – which is handy, considering commercial strawberries are often pesticide-contaminated. Rhubarb and artichokes are great to grow if you have a bit more space. And loads of delish herbs are perennial, including thyme, oregano and lemon balm. If you’re renting, grow long-lived plant babies in pots so they can move with you.

SAVE YOUR SEEDS Seeds cost far less than a live plant and can even be free, if you grow your own. There’s a bit to learn when it comes to saving seeds – accidental cross-pollination, for example, can create funky hybrid varieties that look crazy and taste even worse. So, start with easy plants: lettuce varieties and other leafy greens such as kale, spinach and chard. Let a couple of your best plants go to flower, which will then turn into seeds. Harvest only once totally brown and dry, then tuck them away in a cool place inside until next season.

If you lack the space or inclination to DIY seeds, tap into your local community. Seed-saving groups, community gardens and honesty stalls such as those within the Grow Free or Food Is Free networks are a good bet. Or check if your neighbourhood has a Buy Nothing group, where neighbours gift, lend or share items – including seeds and plants – for free.

USE DIY MINI GREENHOUSES In cooler months, give your veggie seedlings a head start by coddling them inside a warm mini greenhouse made from an upcycled two-litre clear plastic bottle. Remove the cap and label, cut the bottom off and slide it over a young plant, pushing the cut end firmly into the soil. It’ll warm the air and soil directly around your baby plants, helping them grow, while providing protection from frost, heavy rain and pests. Remove it once your plant reaches the top of the bottle.

MAKE YOUR OWN FERTILISER Let’s talk weed tea – the stuff made from weedy plants in your garden, we mean. This is so simple it feels a bit wrong: gather any weeds (stinging nettle is especially good) and cover with rainwater in a bucket. Chuck a lid on and leave it for at least two months. When you next open the bucket, it will stink to high heaven and be ready to be diluted for use as a nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser. Heck, even your own pee is a brilliant fertiliser. Human urine is rich in nitrogen, sterile, free and readily available to all of us. Feeling game? Dilute 10:1 with water and soak the root zone of your plants every month or so.

PLANT FLOWERS TO WARD OFF PESTS If marauding pests arrive, the best – and cheapest – thing to do first is: absolutely nothing. Many common garden pests will soon be eaten by beneficial insects if you just wait a week or two for them to arrive. Ladybugs love eating aphids, for example. And parasitic wasps murder cabbage white butterflies in a particularly brutal way: by laying eggs inside caterpillars and eating them to death from the inside out.

If you’re short on beneficial insects, your garden ecosystem is telling you it needs more diversity. Plant flowers to call more bug friends in – especially yarrow, feverfew, chamomile, sweet alyssum and Queen Anne’s lace. And remember, even certified organic sprays can kill the good guys along with the bad, so avoid wiping out your beneficial insect army by instead plucking pests off with your fingers, or netting key crops (a secondhand mesh curtain will do the trick without breaking the bank).

Really, it’s the simplest and lowest-intervention methods that often work best in an organic veggie patch. So, consider this your permission slip to go be the thriftiest – and laziest – food gardener ever.

This handy guide was featured in our one-off gardening mag, Evergreen. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop or visit one of our lovely stockists.